Brilliant Marketing

This is great stuff.

It works on so many levels, too.

(Design Fetish is one of my favorite sites, also.)

Peter

Scope

Once your project is up and rolling, a serious landmine is "mission creep". Increasing the scope of a project from what was originally planned can wreak havoc on both the calendar and the budget.

The hardest part of managing changes in scope is recognizing what requests can be accommodated-  changing the color of the GUI shouldn't be a big deal, changing the GUI itself is- and which ones are deal breakers.

Defining the limits of the project to all the stakeholders at the beginning can go a long way in producing a project that everyone is happy with.

Peter

Seldom Too Much Planning

My current project is suffering from too little planing on the front end, which is making it expensive on the back end.

I am amazed at how often this happens.

The cheapest part of the project is the planning phase. It involves a limited number of people and hardly any materials, so the cash costs are few, yet most projects spend too little time in this phase. For some reason it doesn't feel like real work, or something that is to be endured rather than as a crucible to refine the project before the first egg is broken.

You wouldn't begin building a house without first knowing exactly what each room is going to look like, yet jobs routinely begin with at only a napkin sketch of the finished product. While this can be successful, the odds of big cash costs and emotional trauma are large.

In short, I'm not sure I have ever worked on a project that was over-planned. I definitely willing to find out.

Feedback

Another solid business book from my library is Jim Collins' "From Good to Great". I'm hardly the first to write about it, but for me the success or failure of feedback loops comes down to one thing: The feedback.

I've found organizations have tremendous difficulty evaluating their work and deciding how to improve it. The crux of the problem is that it can be hard to deliver criticism, even when correct and deserved, without it becoming personal. It is hard to pass judgment on work without our feelings about the person or department coloring the comments, thus making it personal criticism. Yet we often equate our jobs and our work with our self-worth, so when our work is criticized, we internalize the criticism. The coin has two sides.

But honest feedback is the beginning of improvement, if the individual and the group are able and willing to move forward. Placing blame must be avoided, and the focus must be directed on preventing the problem in the future. What caused the failure? A myriad of factors, including: Lack of training, resources, communication or direction. Any can create problems down the line, and must be ferreted out.

The inability or unwillingness to ask why something happened ensures that a similar problem will occur again. Every organization can be great, but most lack the intestinal fortitude to take the first step, break some eggs, and be honest with everyone involved.

Peter

Value

One of the bloggers I follow asked what business books his readers found important. My first choice is Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis. Yes, it's a book about running a baseball team, but its also a book about business.

What Moneyball really focuses on is the value that individuals bring to their organization. Lots of talented people are undervalued by their organizations because they are not flashy or do the high profile work, but their efforts bring greater value to the company, dollar for dollar, hour for hour, that the best paid staff.

Your organization is probably overpaying for the flashy help, too. Dump them and cherry pick two undervalued staff from the shop down the street.

Peter

Fail Points

Every system has Fail Points- they are unavoidable. Nobody, from the corner malt shop to NASA, can afford to engineer every single fail point out of a system. The key is to put them in places they are least likely to do damage, and are easily monitored and accounted for.

I recently visited an organization that had inexperienced, just-above-minimum-wage staff at the beginning of their process. The green staff was then tasked with generating product at a very aggressive rate. While management loved the margins on their products, as labor costs were very low, they couldn't understand their big variance in quality. The front-line workers also struggled to keep to the schedule, costing the company both cash costs in overtime and opportunity costs in production delays.

A giant Fail Point had been placed at the front of the production line- the process clearly exceeded the staff's ability to produce a quality product. The result was that high skill (and high-wage) staff further down the production chain spent time fixing the quality issues that were initiated by the cheap, inexperienced staff. But in a classic "garbage in-garbage out" example, not all of the issues can be fixed down the line. The garbage is baked in.

Customers notice the varying quality of the final product. These inconsistencies will always limit the products potential in the marketplace, especially compared to its peers. The long-term growth of the company is hindered, too.

But the product delivers a fat margin, so everything is fine, right?

Right?

Peter

The Theater of Work

Airlines sometimes refer to staff as either "Front-Stage" or "Back-Stage" personnel.

Translation: Some personnel the customers see and interact with, some do the behind-the-scenes work that make flying the experience what it is. (Please save your jokes for the comments)

Perhaps our experiences with the service world would be different if everyone viewed their work not as a transaction but as a show, a performance, a bit of theater.

Perhaps your workday would be different if you approached it as entertainment others sought out.

Peter